Longfellow Cuts First NYC Purchase Loose for $87M
Longfellow Real Estate Partners’ stewardship of its first New York City purchase didn’t last long.
Adam Sichol’s firm sold the Hatch Life Sciences Building at 43-10 23rd Street in Long Island City for $86.9 million, records show. The buyer was Pearl Realty Management’s Jack Guttman.
Neither buyer nor seller responded to requests for comment from the Commercial Observer. Sculptor Real Estate, a partner to Longfellow in the property’s ownership, also did not comment.
Longfellow splashed into the New York City real estate market in 2021, when it purchased a majority stake in the 200,000-square-foot property, owned at the time by a private real estate fund managed by Columbia Property Trust and Kassabian Realty.
The private fund purchased a 50 percent stake in the six-story factory from Kassabian in 2017 for $54 million. It was originally slated to be turned into an office property before the pandemic sparked a pivot.
Longfellow paid $92.5 million for the majority equity interest,, meaning it took a discount on the sale nearly five years later. It had planned to invest another $120 million to make the building a state-of-the-art life sciences facility.
The completed building includes lab suites, modular research space and flexible office space. There hasn’t been any news about leases being signed at the property, though.
That could be a repercussion of the city’s struggling life sciences market, which faces a 32.5 percent vacancy rate and declining venture capital investment. The headwinds facing the market are tied to a fight for Alexandria Real Estate Equities, which faces a potential $183 million loss in preconstruction costs for a third building at its Kips Bay life sciences campus amid a protracted legal dispute with New York City.
Guttman is a deal hunter. Last year, RXR sold the Standard Motors Product Building in Long Island City for $42 million to Pearl Realty, significantly less than its 2014 purchase price of $110 million.
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